The Poet as a Dictator PDF Download

Author: Ruth Landshoff Yorck
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 1947793004
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 124

View

Book Description
Ursula K. Le Guin discusses her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry?both her process and her philosophy?with all the wisdom, profundity, and rigor we expect from one of the great writers of the last century. When the New York Times referred to Ursula K. Le Guin as America’s greatest writer of science fiction, they just might have undersold her legacy. It’s hard to look at her vast body of work?novels and stories across multiple genres, poems, translations, essays, speeches, and criticism?and see anything but one of our greatest writers, period. In a series of interviews with David Naimon (Between the Covers), Le Guin discusses craft, aesthetics, and philosophy in her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction respectively. The discussions provide ample advice and guidance for writers of every level, but also give Le Guin a chance to to sound off on some of her favorite subjects: the genre wars, the patriarchy, the natural world, and what, in her opinion, makes for great writing. With excerpts from her own books and those that she looked to for inspiration, this volume is a treat for Le Guin’s longtime readers, a perfect introduction for those first approaching her writing, and a tribute to her incredible life and work.

Author: Jean Mudge
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

View

Book Description
This vivid biography is a study of the life and times of the Italian poet-activist, Lauro de Bosis. Remarkably productive as a poet, cultural diplomat, and political subversive, de Bosis founded and lead an underground resistance group, the National Alliance for Liberty. His actions culminated in a dramatic solo flight over Rome in October 1931, showering the city with protest leaflets against the Fascist dictatorship before plunging to his death. This feat brought world attention to the existence of anti-Fascism, much to Mussolini's chagrin and rage. De Bosis's story, told against the backdrop of Rome's politics in the 1920s, is at once personal, national, and international. World figures —- from Mussolini, Croce, Ezra Pound, to Walter Lippmann, Thornton Wilder, and his lover, the actress Ruth Draper —- were all within de Bosis's compass. Gifted, quirky, original, and impulsive but principled to the point of giving up both personal love and family for his cause, his life shows how Mussolini's regime systematically cleared out the cream of Italy's young liberal intellectuals. Based on previously untapped archival resources, this is the first biography of a young, gifted Italian poet who dared to challenge the power of a totalitarian state with his practical idealism and fierce determination to protect Italy's fragile democracy from il Duce.

Author: Luciano Canfora
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520235021
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 416

View

Book Description
In this splendid profile, Canfora offers a radically new interpretation of one of the most controversial figures in history. The result of a comprehensive study of the ancient sources, "Julius Caesar" paints an astonishingly detailed portrait of this complex man and the times in which he lived.

Author: Elizabeth Bishop
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374530761
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 392

View

Book Description
From the mid-1930s to 1978 Elizabeth Bishop published some ninety poems and thirty translations. Yet her notebooks reveal that she embarked upon many more compositions, some existing in only fragmentary form and some embodied in extensive drafts. Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box presents, alongside facsimiles of many notebook pages from which they are drawn, poems Bishop began soon after college, reflecting her passion for Elizabethan verse and surrealist technique; love poems and dream fragments from the 1940s; poems about her Canadian childhood; and many other works that heretofore have been quoted almost exclusively in biographical and critical studies. This revelatory and moving selection brings us into the poet's laboratory, showing us the initial provocative images that moved Bishop to begin a poem, illustrating terrain unexplored in the work published during her lifetime. Editor Alice Quinn has also mined the Bishop archives for rich tangential material that illuminates the poet's sources and intentions.

Author: Haroon Khalid
Publisher: Penguin, Viking
ISBN: 9780670089994
Category : Lahore (Pakistan)
Languages : en
Pages : 304

View

Book Description
An anecdotal travelogue about Lahore - which begins in the present and travels through time to the mythological origins of the city attributed to Ram's son, Lav. Through the city's present - its people, communities, monuments, parks and institutions - the author paints a vivid picture of the city's past. From its emergence under Mahmud Ghaznavi to the Mughal centuries where several succession intrigues unfolded on its soil, its recasting as the capital of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's Khalsa Empire, the role it played in preserving the British Raj, to acting as an incubator of revolutionaries and people's movements, Lahore influenced the subcontinent's political trajectory time and again. Today, too, Lahore often determines which way the wind will blow on Pakistan's political landscape. The Lahore Resolution of 1940, which laid the blueprint for the creation of the country, was signed here. The city saw the birth of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's PPP, as well as his downfall. It was to Lahore that Benazir Bhutto returned to combat a military dictator, and where Imran Khan heralded his arrival as a main contender on the political battlefield. As the capital of Punjab, Lahore continues to cast a long shadow over the federal state.

Author: Dominique Kirchner Reill
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674249690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

View

Book Description
Recasting the birth of fascism, nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I, Dominique Kirchner Reill recounts how the people of Fiume tried to recreate empire in the guise of the nation. The Fiume Crisis recasts what we know about the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I by telling the story of the three-year period when the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia) generated an international crisis. In 1919 the multicultural former Habsburg city was occupied by the paramilitary forces of the flamboyant poet-soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio, who aimed to annex the territory to Italy and became an inspiration to Mussolini. Many local Italians supported the effort, nurturing a standard tale of nationalist fanaticism. However, Dominique Kirchner Reill shows that practical realities, not nationalist ideals, were in the driver’s seat. Support for annexation was largely a result of the daily frustrations of life in a “ghost state” set adrift by the fall of the empire. D’Annunzio’s ideology and proto-fascist charisma notwithstanding, what the people of Fiume wanted was prosperity, which they associated with the autonomy they had enjoyed under Habsburg sovereignty. In these twilight years between the world that was and the world that would be, many across the former empire sought to restore the familiar forms of governance that once supported them. To the extent that they turned to nation-states, it was not out of zeal for nationalist self-determination but in the hope that these states would restore the benefits of cosmopolitan empire. Against the too-smooth narrative of postwar nationalism, The Fiume Crisis demonstrates the endurance of the imperial imagination and carves out an essential place for history from below.

Author: Geoffrey Roberts
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300179049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

View

Book Description
A compelling intellectual biography of Stalin told through his personal library "[A] fascinating new study."--Michael O'Donnell, Wall Street Journal In this engaging life of the twentieth century's most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words, and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, this book explores all aspects of Stalin's tumultuous life and politics. Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated, revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Based on his wide-ranging research in Russian archives, Roberts tells the story of the creation, fragmentation, and resurrection of Stalin's personal library. As a true believer in communist ideology, Stalin was a fanatical idealist who hated his enemies--the bourgeoisie, kulaks, capitalists, imperialists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, traitors--but detested their ideas even more.

Author: Corsino Fortes
Publisher: Archipelago
ISBN: 091467112X
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 146

View

Book Description
Concerned with giving voice to Cape Verdean life, Fortes writes in Cape Verdean Creole - and not just standard Portuguese - a powerful statement reinforcing the islands' distinctive African nature. However, his poems are often written from the perspective of an exile - and themes of exile and redemptive return recur in his work. This collection introduces English readers to Fortes, and the poet's beautiful and unique use of language.

Author: Daniel Kalder
Publisher: Oneworld
ISBN: 9781786070586
Category : Dictators
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
A Book of the Year for The Times and the Sunday Times 'The writer is the engineer of the human soul,' claimed Stalin. Although one wonders how many found nourishment in Turkmenbashi's Book of the Soul (once required reading for driving tests in Turkmenistan), not to mention Stalin's own poetry. Certainly, to be considered great, a dictator must write, and write lots. Mao had his Little Red Book, Mussolini and Saddam Hussein their romance novels, Kim Jong-il his treatise on the art of film, Hitler his hate-filled tracts. What do they reveal about their authors, the worst people imaginable? And how did they shape twentieth-century history? To find out, Daniel Kalder read them all - the badly written and the astonishingly badly written - so that you don't have to. This is the untold history of books so terrible they should have been crimes.